Survival Extreme

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Survival Extreme is a military-themed reality competition television series. The program was hosted by Lieutenant Stone, and featured fifteen popular stars going through "intense commando training" before being pitted against each other to see who's skills are more... extreme!

The odds are a million to one! AND THAT'S THE WAY WE LIKE 'EM!

— Lieutenant Stone's closing lines of the Survival Extreme opening credits., "Threat Matrix, Prologue: Cover Girl"

Fiction[edit | edit source]

Survival Extreme featured a cast of fifteem celebrities split up into teams (two of which were Team Mayday and Team Ballistic.) In the show's "story", the world's superpowers were threatening to collapse and these two teams were competing for control of the tropical island the show was being filmed on. The show's fiction also somehow involved the forces of SCAR and the Iron Claw as antagonists.

Each week, the celebrities involved on the show would undergo training in a specific field of military training and then representatives from both teams would use their training to compete against each other in challenges with the loser presumably being eliminated. Among the challenges featured on the show were camouflage, sharpshooting, judo, grenade launcher shooting, and minefield traversal. Of those, former supermodel Courtney Kreiger won the camo, sharpshooting, and grenade launcher challenges while Richard Ruby won judo.

During the filming of the show's final episode, wherein Team Mayday's Courtney Kreiger faced off against Team Ballistic's Richard Ruby in the minefield traversal challenge, the cast and crew of the show were found and held hostage by Nanzhonese pirates. Kreiger avoided being taken, having gone to look for where the fake minefield was set up when the pirates arrived, and put her training to real world use for the first time, dispatching the pirates with remarkable efficiency. Ruby helped out as well, his prior military background coming in handy.

Kreiger would ultimately win the competition. Threat Matrix, Prologue: Cover Girl

G.I. Joe: Extreme references[edit | edit source]

Survival Extreme is one big reference/parody of G.I. Joe: Extreme, one of the 90s-era attempts at relaunching the G.I. Joe franchise. Many of the show's elements are direct references to the cartoon, including:

  • The theme song is lifted almost verbatim from the G.I. Joe: Extreme cartoon's theme song intro.
  • Lt. Stone was the leader of the G.I. Joe team in the cartoon.
  • The team names, "Team Mayday" and "Team Ballistic," are taken from other members of the cartoon's cast. (Ironically, the name "Mayday" would later be applied to the character of Ayana Jones when she became a member of G.I. Joe.)
  • "SCAR" and "the Iron Claw" are fictional versions of the villains from G.I. Joe: Extreme; the villainous organization, S.K.A.R., and its leader, Iron Klaw, respectively, (replacing the "K" in the originals' names with a "C.") Considering the fact that Revolutionaries would later reveal that there is an actual villainous Iron Klaw out there, one has to wonder who thought naming the fictional villain of their TV show the same as an actual dictator was a good idea?

Notes[edit | edit source]

  • In addition to parodying G.I. Joe: Extreme, Survival Extreme also parodies the popular Survivor reality competition series.